Harold Bloom quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Harold Bloom

Harold Bloom Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from Harold Bloom on Wise Famous Quotes.

Almost anything at all can be transmuted into a labyrinth.

I would say that there is no future for literary studies as such in the United States.

(Wallace) Stevens turns to the idea of the weather precisely as the religious idea turns to the idea of God.

A poem, novel, or play acquires all of humanity's disorders, including the fear of mortality

I think the Greek New Testament is the strongest and most successful misreading of a great prior text in the entire history of influence.

Memory is always in art, even when it works involuntarily.

I am naive enough to read incessantly because I cannot, on my own, get to know enough people profoundly enough.

Literature is achieved anxiety.

Infinite Jest' is just awful. It seems ridiculous to have to say it.

Real reading is a lonely activity.

He can't think, he can't write. There's no discernible talent.

The inventor knows HOW to borrow.

There is a God, and his name is Aristophanes.

Great literature will insist upon its self-sufficiency in the face of the worthiest causes

To be a poet did not occur to me. It was indeed a threshold guarded by demons.

Dante subsumed everything, and so, in a sense, secularized nothing.

Shakespeare is universal.

Sometimes one succeeds, sometimes one fails.

It is by extending oneself, by exercising some capacity previously unused that you come to a better knowledge of your own potential.

In the finest critics one hears the full cry of the human. They tell one why it matters to read.

I have never believed that the critic is the rival of the poet, but I do believe that criticism is a genre of literature or it does not exist.

One breaks into the canon only by aesthetic strength.

For Ibsen, gusto forgives almost everything.

Until you become yourself," Bloom avers, "what benefit can you be to others.

The democratic age mourns the value of human beings.

Originality must compound with inheritance.

He made darkness his secret place; his pavilion round about him were dark waters and thick clouds of the skies.

All that a critic, as critic, can give poets is the deadly encouragement that never ceases to remind them of how heavy their inheritance is.

You can read merely to pass the time, or you can read with an overt urgency, but eventually you will read against the clock.

Greatness recognizes greatness, and is shadowed by it.

The aesthetic is an individual rather than a societal concern.

Reading well is one of the great pleasures that solitude can afford you.

Socrates, in Plato, formulates ideas of order: the Iliad, like Shakespeare, knows that a violent disorder is a great order.

I realized early on that the academy and the literary world alike

The James family, raised by their Emersonian father, accepted their heritage, with reservations by Henry yet fewer by William.

Shakespeare and his few peers invented all of us.

Marxism, famously a cry of pain rather than a science, has had its poets, but so has every other major religious heresy.

Infinite knowledge can never wonder. All wonder is the effect of novelty upon ignorance.

There is no method except yourself.

At eighty-four, I can only write the way I go on teaching, personally and passionately.

The unity of a great era is generally an illusion.

Stephen King is Cervantes compared with David Foster Wallace. We have no standards left.

We'll try this first. If it doesn't work, we'll try something else. That's life, isn't it?

More even than Southern Presbyterians and Southern Methodists, the Baptists provided the great mass of Confederate enlisted men.

The most beautiful prose paragraph yet written by any American.

A political reading of Shakespeare is bound to be less interesting than a Shakespearean reading of politics[.]

It is hard to go on living without some hope of encountering the extraordinary.

Vision is defined as a program for restoring the human.

No one yet has managed to be post-Shakespearean.

Information is endlessly available to us; where shall wisdom be found?

American Religionists, when I questioned them, frequently said that falling in love was affirming again Christ's love for each of them.

Oscar Wilde's "beautiful untrue things" that save the imagination from falling into "careless habits of accuracy.

Persuasion is a strong but subdued outrider.

Calling a work of sufficient literary power either religious or secular is a political decision, not an aesthetic one.

There is no God but God, and his name is William Shakespeare.

Terror and rapture to Emily Dickinson are alternative words for "transport".

Romance depends upon imperfect knowledge.

Samuel Johnson said Alexander Pope's translation of the Iliad, tuned the English tongue.

The old-fashioned sins of reading is the only sense that matters.

The world does not get to be a better or a worse place; it just gets more senescent.

You get too much at last of everything: of sunsets, of cabbages, of love.

Everything in life is arbitrary yet must be over-determined in literature. Jean McGarry knows how to tell a persuasive tale illuminating these truths.

The very best of all Merwin: I have been reading William since 1952, and always with joy.

Personality, in our sense, is a Shakespearean invention.

The aesthetic and the agonistic are one, according to the ancient Greeks.

What we call a poem is mostly what is not there on the page. The strength of any poem is the poems that it has managed to exclude.

We read, I think, to repair our solitude, though pragmatically the better we read, the more solitary we become.

Everyone wants a prodigy to fail; it makes our mediocrity more bearable.

Read deeply, not to believe, not to accept, not to contradict, but to learn to share in that one nature that writes and reads.

We read to find ourselves, more fully and more strangely than otherwise we could hope to find.

We are destroying all esthetic standards in the name of social justice.

King die hard, in Shakespeare and in life.

Nietzsche tended to equate the memorable with the painful.

We read frequently if unknowingly, in quest of a mind more original than our own.

Characters carrying the playwright's disapproval is a un-Shakespearian burden.

At our present bad moment, we need above all to recover our sense of literary individuality and of poetic autonomy.

seeking comfort through continuity, as grand voices somehow hold off the permanent darkness that gathers though it does not fall.

I take it that a successful therapy is an oxymoron.

The originals are not original, but that Emersonian irony yield to the Emersonian pragmatism that the inventor knows how to borrow.

Poetry, at the best, does us a kind of violence that prose fiction rarely attempts or accomplishes.

Capital is necessary to the cultivation of esthetic value.

The reception of aesthetic power enables us to learn how to talk to ourselves and how to endure ourselves.

Spiritual power and spiritual authority notoriously shade over into both politics and poetry.

All of us are, as Mr. Stevens said, "condemned to be that inescapable animal, ourselves.

Thou shalt be a terror, and never shalt be any more.

Unless you have read and absorbed the best that can be read and absorbed, you will not think clearly or well.

The art and passion of reading well and deeply is waning, but [Jane] Austen still inspires people to become fanatical readers.

Such a reader does not read for easy pleasure or to expiate social guilt, but to enlarge a solitary existence.

All writers are to some extent inventors, describing people as they would like to see them in life.

Great writing is always rewriting or revisionism, and is founded on a reading that clears space for the self.

To deprive the derelicts of hope is right, and to sustain them in their illusory "pipe dreams" is right also.

We read, frequently if not unknowingly, in search of a mind more original than our own.

All canonical writing possesses the quality of making you feel strangeness at home.

No one has yet managed to be post-Shakespearean.

I don't believe in myths of decline or myths of progress, even as regards the literary scene.

The idea of Herman Melville in a writing class is always distressing to me.

No poem, not even Shakespeare or Milton or Chaucer, is ever strong enough to totally exclude every crucial precursor text or poem.

Karl Marx is irrelevant to many millions of them because, in America, religion is the poetry of the people and not their opiate.

Lawrence will go on burying his own undertakers.

Shakespeare's exquisite imagining belies our total inability to live in the present moment.